Visoft, Inc. Blogs (Page 3)

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What's That Syntax Highlighting Scheme?

What's That Syntax Highlighting Scheme?

Back in my last post, I mentioned switching to highlight.js. Today, I wanted to talk to you about the theme I used to highlight the examples (most) on the Visoft, Inc. Blog. I’m a huge fan of Ryan Bates’ RailsCasts. They are an incredible resource for learning and

Moving to highlight.js

Moving to highlight.js

New Year, New Changes You may have noticed a bit of a difference on the Visoft, Inc. Blogs today. I started the first (of hopefully many) changes to the site. The newer code snippets (really old ones have embedded styles, yuck :)) have a new look. What’s going on here?

ActiveRecord Queries - Drop the Question Marks

You learn something new everyday! Of course it’s in the documentation, but it’s easy to overlook features. Background As you may or may not know, ActiveRecord lets you specify conditions in a multitude of ways. Take the first example from the docs: class User < ActiveRecord::Base def

responsive-web-design

Responsive Web Design - Helpful Links

This post looks at the basics of Responsive Web Design (RWD) and takes you on a tour around the web of some helpful links about the three principles of RWD: CSS Media Queries, Fluid Grids, and Fluid Images and Media. I hope you find these useful. There’s tons of

Major Ruby OData Update v0.1.0

It’s here! I’m happy to announce a major release of ruby_odata, v0.1.0. There are many enhancements found in this release so let’s dig in and see what’s new. There is one thing that we need to get out of the way first, a

Ruby OData Update v0.0.10

I’m happy to announce that today, ruby_odata has continued to move forward by adding additional features and fixing bugs. I skipped an update for v0.0.9, so let’s revisit what was added/fixed back then. The major change was support for self-signed SSL certificates. That addition

Silverlight 4 Multi-Binding Converter Enhancement

We have been using Colin Eberhardt’s MultiBinding Converter for Silverlight for quite a while now. It was great until we realized a problem. When the MultiBinding Converter was off screen (hidden), it would throw a binding error stating that it couldn’t convert null to whatever (in our case

Silverlight 4 Drop-Down Problems in Popup

Are you running Silverlight and using a Popup and a “drop-down” control like a ComboBox (or DatePicker, TimePicker, etc) as a child? You may be seeing some odd behavior when you expand the ComboBox. The “drop-down bit” ends up positioned from the left of your screen, not where it is

Introducing a Ruby Wrapper for Google Books API

Books. Personally, I own a ton of them. Add in my wife’s collection, and phew. A few years ago, I decided to get my collection under control. I have bookcases upon bookcases all over the place and I would lose track of my books. I wanted to catalog my

entity-framework

Entity Framework - Removing Foreign Keys from the Entity Model

Entity Framework 4.0 has brought some great new features to Entity Framework (although I am SO looking forward to EF 4.1. Hooray for a code-only option). One of the new features of EF 4 is the ability to include foreign key columns in your model. This option will

Ruby OData Update v0.0.8

It has been WAY too long since an update of ruby_odata was released. I’m happy to announce that version 0.0.8 was released today. The biggest change, thanks to J.D. Mullin, is support for Basic HTTP Authentication. It’s an awesome enhancement and very easy to

Data Access and Silverlight 4

You’ve decided to create a new business application (meaning some n-tier application) using Silverlight as the frontend. Is Silverlight the best choice? That’s a debate for another post… Anyway, now it comes to deciding on a data access strategy, which one do you choose? Well this is one

Ruby OData Update v0.0.7

I just wanted to give an update on the ruby_odata progress. If you don’t know about ruby_odata or want a refresher, I blogged about it a few weeks ago. Anyway, I just released a new version of the gem, v0.0.7. With this new version, you

Introducing a Ruby OData Client Library

Ever since the ADO.NET team started development on Astoria (pre-release), I have loved the concept. Since its release (it was called ADO.NET Data Services and is now WCF Data Services), I’ve used it a ton (you may remember the example from this post). Back at MIX10, Microsoft

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) with Cucumber and ASP.NET MVC

So as I’m sure you have guessed by my last bunch of posts, I’ve been hooked on Ruby and Rails development. The more I use it, the more I love it. I felt I was loving it a bit too much, so decided to divert my attention back

Ruby Beauty – Rendering a Rails Partial for a Collection

Continuing with my exploration of Ruby on Rails as a .NET guy, here’s an awesome example of Convention over Configuration at work. I decided to add bite size snippets of some of the cool things I encountered in Ruby and Rails. If you are interested in more, see my

Ruby Beauty – Rails and Time Zones

Continuing with my exploration of Ruby on Rails as a .NET guy, here’s an awesome example of Convention over Configuration at work. I decided to add bite size snippets of some of the cool things I encountered in Ruby and Rails. If you are interested in others, see my

Ruby Beauty – Method Naming Conventions

Continuing with my exploration of Ruby as a .NET guy, here’s another example of Ruby’s expressive syntax in action. I decided to add bite size snippets of some of the cool things I encountered in Ruby and Rails. If you are interested in more, see my other Ruby

ActiveSupport Singularize Problem

I just happened to encounter a problem with the ActiveSupport inflector in my Rails app. Here’s the problem: words that end in ess seem to be an issue. For example: 'dress'.singularize # => 'dres' 'business'.singularize # => 'busines' 'address'

Ruby Beauty – Optional Parentheses on Method Calls

Continuing with my exploration of Ruby as a .NET guy, here’s another example of Ruby’s expressive syntax in action. I decided to add bite size snippets of some of the cool things I encountered in Ruby and Rails. If you are interested in more, see my other Ruby

Ruby Beauty – Dynamically Invoking Methods

Continuing with my exploration of Ruby as a .NET guy, here’s another example of Ruby’s expressive syntax in action. I decided to add bite size snippets of some of the cool things I encountered in Ruby and Rails. If you are interested in others, see my other Ruby

Installing Ruby on Rails on Windows

So it’s not like this doesn’t exist elsewhere on the ‘net, but in case you stumbled upon one of my other Ruby on Rails posts and I caught your interest, here’s how to get started developing Rails apps on Windows. If you’re a little resistant to

Ruby Beauty – Iteration with an Index

I just love how expressive and clean Ruby’s syntax is. How often do you need to iterate over a collection and get a count as well? That sort of code is ugly in something like C#, but in Ruby: people = %w{Dave Bill Mike Mark John} # Simple collection of

Ruby on Rails Shared Hosting Mongrel Issues

I have had just about nothing but issues getting my Rails application running on my shared host. I’m not going to mention the company since they have been somewhat helpful, however I’m not thrilled with them. I don’t want to give them any good or bad press

Ruby on Rails Shared Hosting Gem Issue

Ruby on Rails Shared Hosting Gem Issue

I recently signed up on a shared hosting plan for playing around with Ruby on Rails apps. I finally had an app roughly together, and I wanted to test out my deployment using Capistrano. I was able to configure my deploy.rb file so everything uploaded correctly, and figured that